A Changing Pattern

We have seen that the children who were emigrated enjoyed few rights; but in the nineteenth century this was the case for children generally. The rights that did exist were the result of the gradual curtailment of a father's historic right to do whatever he liked with his children. These limitations arose with the increasing involvement of the state in securing the education, health and protection of children. However, it was the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early years of the next that witnessed the emergence of more far-reaching interventions whereby, under certain circumstances, a child could be removed from parental custody on a court order and placed with somebody else or with a corporate body. The grounds for such an order were couched in terms of the parents’ unfitness to retain custody. In some cases the removal was clearly necessary in order to protect a child from abuse, but the precise threshold beyond which such action should be taken was largely unspecified, as were the residual rights that parents continued to have – such as giving or withholding their consent to emigration.

However, assumptions about parental ‘fitness’ also affected the way in which the parents of children who had been admitted to Poor Law or other institutions on a voluntary basis were treated. They could be kept at arm's length by information being withheld, by visiting being severely restricted and by the receipt and sending of letters being obstructed. Furthermore, children could be retained against the wishes of their parents without any legal basis for doing so. This informal restriction of parental rights was reflected in the manner in which many agencies dealt with the question of obtaining parental agreements to the emigration of children in their care. Some, like Barnardos, required a parent to sign an undertaking that, as a condition of their child's admission, they would allow emigration if that were considered to be appropriate. Other societies, such as Middlemores, only offered emigration so that it was apparent at the outset that this was the intention. Nonetheless, parents who sought their child's admission to such organisations could be constrained by the lack of an alternative – except the Poor Law from which many recoiled.